Bring them all
by Ju-dou
Summary: Catching Fire AU. Chapter Two: He cannot tell what she is fighting for, anymore, but he knows what he fears, that she will fight to keep him alive, that she has already said goodbye. /I love you as the plant that never blooms/but carries within itself the light of hidden flowers/
1. Chapter 1

_A/N: So, this happened. The Hunger Games hit me like an... avalanche? over four nights of late reading, and well, better late than never, eh?! Would love to know what you think, so if you have a moment, please, let me know :)_

* * *

_I love you as certain dark things are to be loved/in secret/between the shadow and the soul ~ _Pablo Neruda

"There isn't much time, so tell me. Is there anything I have to apologize for?"

"Nothing."

* * *

**Ara**

_An altar; an elevated place or structure upon which offerings such as sacrifices are made for religious purposes._

It is something from the time long before.

_An altar. _She cannot remember learning the word or its definition but it is apt for the moment when her dress became points and feathers.

_A sacrifice_. This is a word she understands well, in all its permutations. It runs through her like water, living is a sacrifice; an offering.

His life for hers.

Life will break you and the pieces will be small and insignificant.

Some of their eyes close, for a split second when the words pass Peeta's lips, but hers remain open although she does not see. It is dark. There is nothing. Then she is falling, slipping from the seat and onto the floor. Beneath her ribs a flicker begins that moves to the centre of her chest and Katniss is aware that she is breathing. Hands lift her and she clings to those faceless crutches on either side as a wave of noise spirals and shatters in the black.

"A nice touch," Haymitch says. "The fainting. As if the moment couldn't get any more melodramatic."

Katniss hears him but her eyes focus somewhere near the tip of his ear, so he waves his hand at her, flicking his fingers out as if shaking something from their tips.

"The cameras are gone, sweetheart."

She tastes metal and realises she has bitten her tongue. The mockingjay is heavy on her back, on her hips, pulling her into the ground when she should be soaring.

"Someone get her some water," Haymitch says, annoyance turning his upper lip, he takes a perfunctory glance around the corridor for an Avox, but they are alone.

There is silence, the kind that is like drowning.

"Now what?" Peeta says.

Haymitch crosses to the window, and watches the pulses of colour and light as the streets below erupt, the earth has moved beneath their feet, and just for a moment they are all culpable. They flee but a fissure has already appeared and it will swallow them.

"It won't be enough to stop it, even with her acting," he watches Katniss, waiting for something to stir behind her eyes, "some of which she should save for the arena."

He has no last words for them; he walks away down the corridor and does not look back.

* * *

**Carina**

_A keel; runs through the middle of the ship, from bow to stern, providing the main source of structural strength._

He listens to the sound of water, his feet planted firmly on the carpet at the side of the bed, his elbows resting on his knees. He is grounded. Blue sparks. Alcohol burns blue; he knows that from setting fire to soiled clothes on a day filled with snow. If he thinks of her he thinks of orange, a fire at the beginning, before it roars.

A mockingjay. Of course.

As Katniss span he knew the smoke to be a trick, a clever piece of engineering, but just for a moment he saw her burn and the fire die, just as it had in her eyes as he looked to her in the audience. Perhaps it is a kind of arrogance, to be one step ahead in this game, to save an apology for afterwards, when the words cannot be unsaid. To masquerade as her partner, her ally, and all the time give no hint of the course he is charting.

She professed to need no apology but her silence says otherwise.

It costs him nothing to manipulate the emotions of the rabid Capitol public, to bring tears to the eyes of a man with lavender hair, but he fears he has exploited something he shouldn't have. Perhaps it is fear. The fear that this world could ever kill a child of hers.

He will do or say anything to save her. Let everything else crumble around them.

This is the problem. He will do it for her, he will not rise from a platform bearing wings, he will not unite what is fractured; he will die and hope only that she lives.

Katniss emerges from the shower room, a cloud of steam blurring her edges. Peeta smiles but she does not smile back. Turning away she drops her towel and pulls a pair of pyjamas from a drawer and he has to avert his eyes from the base of her spine, the juts of her shoulder blades, the bruise that is turning purple near her hip.

She swipes her hand across the control panel and the room goes dark.

He listens as she lies down and pulls up the sheet; he can barely hear her breathing. If she didn't want him here she would ask him to leave. Peeta lies down beside her on top of the quilt. He can sense she is facing away from him. He rests his hand on her hip and she doesn't move away. Nightmares fill the space between them and he doesn't want to wait for her to cry out to bridge the gap. Shuffling forwards he rests his cheek against her back. She is warm from the shower but she does not smell of a bizarre concoction of soaps and powders, she has removed every trace of the evening from her skin.

"It's almost like we're back on the victory tour. It's always felt like this moment was there, waiting. I never felt safe; I wish I'd enjoyed not really knowing this would happen," he says.

"Would it have changed anything?" Her voice surprises him and his lets his thumb press a little harder against her hipbone.

"I'd have smiled more."

"I couldn't have smiled and waved any more than I did."

"I mean away from the cameras," Peeta says.

They did live away from the cameras, in shards, entwined together beneath the covers at night, shattered pieces that made a whole. She cut into him like a blade, any defence he had left bleeding into her, leaving him pale in her absence. She flinches slightly beneath his cheek and he moves his hand up to run along her ribs, she is thin again, despite their training, and he senses a physical fragility that scares him.

"You passed out, didn't you? I know you're not that good an actress."

"You have no idea how good an actress I am."

* * *

**Horologium**

_Pendulum clock; a clock that uses a swinging weight as its timekeeping element._

She goes onto the roof to see the stars. If they are stars, not a decorative illusion for the Capitol residents' viewing pleasure.

She is a decoration, here, and when she speeds up she lets things run off course, she does not keep time. Peeta keeps them running far more than Effie and her scheduling. He is constant, still in mind if not in heart. She knows he will wake and finding her gone know exactly where she is, and when Katniss turns around he is already there, a vine concealing half his face. Lights shine somewhere among the foliage and they play on his cheekbone as he moves forwards.

"What's going on?" he asks.

She shrugs, it is such a reflexive childish gesture that she hunches her shoulders halfway through.

"Personally, spending the night lying next to you pretending to sleep was more what I had in mind, rather than roaming the roof."

"What if you could throw yourself off?"

"I wouldn't do that."

"I know you wouldn't."

"Neither would you," he says, reaching for her hand.

She crosses her arms tightly.

"You really think I don't know you?" Peeta asks.

"I didn't say that," she replies, and she wants to run.

He shakes his head. "We stopped running."

"What?"

"When we started to train, watch the tapes, put on our 'show,' but at some point you started running again. I can't even pinpoint when, I just felt it, and then tonight you hit a wall."

She is trapped, by his honesty, by the gentle way he is watching her, the crease in his forehead as he tries to take her hand again. This time, she lets him. She falls against his chest, her arms wrap around his neck, and her lips touch the skin between his jaw and ear. He tastes of yesterday. He tastes of the train as it rumbled through the dark, and she clung to him, her tears drying on his shoulder as she curved around him.

"Did you truly think they would let me go if you said that?"

"No, but I knew the effect it would have on the audience. If you really were pregnant you would never have got this far. They don't know me if they think I would have let that happen. Now, I can only make it as hard as possible for them to kill you."

She knew this is how it would be, that they would be keeping each other alive, waiting for a chance to die as the other ran to the finish. She knew, but it had not altered her determination, the feeling she would like to seal her deal with Haymitch with something tighter than words, it had changed nothing. The game is always the same. Until it isn't.

She lets him lead her back to bed and they resume their positions, his arm around her waist. He kisses the back of her neck but her body remains rigid.

"Katniss," Peeta whispers, pulling a little on her hip so she turns over to face him.

She cannot see him in the dark, not clearly, the silvery lines of his nose and lips barely visible.

"You can't stop me."


	2. Chapter 2

_A/N: Any feedback super gratefully received :)) __ The song lyrics are from an old Scottish mining song._

* * *

**Circinus**

_Compass; a device used to measure the distance between two opposite sides of an object._

* * *

_The tunnel is too narrow. There is coal in her lungs, in her eyes. There is fire at her feet, a noise in front of her where her chin scrapes the earth, and she can make out two feet there, small bare feet. It is a child, and it is impossible to tell whether they are travelling away from the danger or towards it. They will be crushed, it has already begun and she reaches forwards and closes her hand around the thin ankle. At first there is a tug, but she holds tightly until the feet still and then she lets go and presses her palm against the sole of a blackened foot no bigger than her hand._

Katniss wakes screaming, and Peeta is not there.

Sweat runs down her chest and she lets her head hang forwards for a moment. Relief does not come. Her cries become gasps and she twists the sheets either side of her around and around her hands until they burn.

_She is standing too close to a meagre fire in her home whilst her mother attempts to cauterize an amputated leg, and the smell, the smell…_

Katniss vomits. Bile pools on the sheet and she thinks of cutting open a squirrel riddled with disease, the way its insides dissolved among meat tuned black.

She turns away from pain, from the pain of others, from her own.

_She runs from her mother's kitchen and sits outside on cold nights whilst someone weeps by the fire, their loved one's life running through their fingers._

Her legs tremble but her hands move quickly to ball up the sheet and dispense of it in a corner, but when she tries to reach the bathroom her knees fold and she sinks to the ground, her hands outstretched in front of her, her fingers touching the fragile web of bones in that little foot.

_Girlhood days are done_

_Now she'll never feel the summer rain 'til it's running underground_

_Never see a winter sun_

_And never question that the likes of her are bound_

She rests her forehead on the carpet and wishes for the cool hard floorboards of home. It isn't morning and she moans in anger, frustration, denial. Let it come, euthanize and paralyze her.

Peeta returns before the day does.

"Put your arms around my neck."

He tells her that they have time, there are still hours, minutes left in which to rest. She is not with him, unresisting as he changes her top and wets a towel to cool her neck.

Something is wrong.

She is running.

He holds her as her eyes roll back and a shout rises in his own chest.

"Katniss?"

Her neck arches over his arm, her throat exposed, a frantic pulse ticking beneath the skin. She is so cold and his fingers trail down her arm. He reaches to the nightstand and hits a button to summon help. Nobody answers. No-one comes. They never do. For a moment he thinks she will die, like this, in his arms unharmed, no blood spreading beneath her, no injury inflicted by arrow or knife, no pain. The first thing he thinks is that if she died there is nobody he wouldn't kill, and it surprises him, the idea that he would kill for revenge and not survival. _Run, Katniss, run. _He asked her to run, he demanded she ran, and then out here she must stand beside him as if their bond is unbreakable, as if she feels the way he does. In the arena he will push her away; it will come to that. He loves her enough to let her go, not to hesitate.

* * *

_His eyes are grey likes hers, and when she rolls him onto his back he blinks up at her. They are outside, they escaped and she cannot imagine how, but it is true, they are at the boarded entrance of the mine. The little boy is covered in coal dust and she blows gently over his long eyelashes, his cheeks, his parched lips. His fingers reach up and touch a necklace that is hanging around her neck. Then, the ground around them shatters, bursting into flames, and she is picking him up, holding him against her and running. Running until she can no longer feel her legs. In that moment she knows that behind them Peeta is burning._

_It is a dream, a tear in the fabric of her mind tells her that, and yet she continues to run, the child's head bumping on her shoulder._

_She stops, laying the boy down beside a tree, her hand passing across his brow, her lips close to his cheek. She does not kiss him. She leaves him and begins running back towards the inferno._

_Peeta._

"Peeta!"

"I'm here, Katniss."

He grips her hand and when she tries to sit up an itch of pain travels up her arm. She is attached to a tube, lying on a bed that is starched and white. It's over, she thinks, for one cruel moment, before the relief digs into her stomach and reality emerges either side of her. Haymitch and Cinna.

"Good of you to join us," Haymitch says. "Your timing is impeccable."

"What happened?"

"One of you update her," Haymitch says. "I'll be back later."

"Later?"

"It's been postponed," Peeta says, his fingers tightening around hers.

"No." She struggles to sit up again.

She cannot wait; not one more hour, not one more day. She cannot change her mind.

"Why?"

"For your wedding," Cinna replies.

* * *

Peeta waits for her to fall asleep before leaving. He doesn't realise Cinna has followed him until they reach the television room.

"Don't turn it on," Cinna says as he sits on the opposite couch.

"Why?"

"You don't need to see."

The wedding build-up has already begun. Peeta shakes his head, hardly believing that with the dawn came Plutarch's announcement that an official wedding would take place for the young lovers. A way to placate the viewers, draw them in so they can't look away when one, or both, of the happy couple is killed.

It is sick.

It is what the Capitol wants.

He looks down at his hands and then up at Cinna's gold rimmed eyes.

"I don't want to do this; I don't think Katniss _can_ do it."

"It gives us more time."

"It won't change anything, all we can do is not mess up, nothing is going to keep her out of that arena."

"She can't go in," Cinna says, his eyes regarding Peeta steadily.

"I don't want her to, of course I don't, but it's going to happen whatever I try."

"She won't come out."

Peeta feels a gelatinous lump forming in the back of his throat, his damp palms bearing down on his knees. He stands up suddenly, afraid he will bury his head in his hands and simply cry if he does not. He turns on Cinna.

"What more can I do?" he demands. "Something happened out there, we all made a stand last night, and now they're punishing us for it."

"You took a risk."

"And, smart though it was at the time," Haymitch enters the room, a drink in his hand, "you've now got quite a performance to put on, so get practising."

_I don't need to act_, Peeta thinks, _I never have._

"Katniss is doing a pretty good job, already. Collapsing at every given opportunity."

Peeta sinks back onto the couch. "She's really sick."

Haymitch waves his hand, sloshing alcohol onto the thick rug at his feet, the droplets glistening on the tips of the fibres. "She'll be fine, and if she isn't Cinna will make it look like she is."

"She needs to rest."

Haymitch turns on Cinna. "Get your team back."

Cinna leaves the room silently, glancing at Peeta, something unintelligible in his expression.

"Caesar is doing a wedding special, tonight. He'll want to interview both you and Katniss," Haymitch says, draining the tumbler.

"They can interview me, but not her," Peeta replies, his jaw set, an ache beneath his eyes.

"Fine," Haymitch says. "That works better; she's resting, the baby, blah blah blah."

"Stop it."

"What?"

"Stop acting like this is just another part of the game, it isn't. I just want it to stop."

"Hey, don't fail me now; you've always been the lynchpin of this whole charade."

Peeta looks at Haymitch, his mentor, the man who won, and he sees a life cut apart and reconstructed over a foundation that has crumbled. He feels that if he pushed Haymitch too hard, through the glass coffee table, he would bleed into nothing, that there is nothing left. Heart and lungs and bones floating in alcohol. We never win.

The odds are never in our favour.

Peeta goes back to the treatment centre and sits beside Katniss' bed, his fingers resting on the inside of her wrist where the veins criss-cross. She must have been given something to make her sleep, he has never seen her face so still, her hands limp and not clenched into fists, not for months. Peeta lets his eyes travel over her body, peaceful in repose, and he imagines the dappled light of the woods, or the honey-coloured glow late at night on the train. He sees her smiling, or her eyebrows knitted as she leans over him and tells him that he will be all right, that she won't let the blackness spread to his brain.

It is too late, his blood is not poisoned but he feels consumed by something vicious, a malignancy that starts in the prosthetic leg they gave him. They gave it to him only so he could continue, so he could be here, kept alive for as long as it took. He can only see one reason for that now.

He thinks of her chin resting on the tip of his shoulder, her fingers on his cheek bone, her lips at the notch below his sternum. Peeta feels it sliding further from reach, everything he held together to get her and Haymitch through the training. As soon as she let him back into her bed it was over. He had nightmares, too. One night he dreamt that he died in their first games, that Katniss won and was scraped from the ground in pieces like fallen leaves. She was put back together, unfolded into a flower, sent out into the Capitol to be touched, to be coveted, to be taken by the highest bidder. He could do nothing but watch as the life was stripped from her petal by petal.

Something is wrong.

He cannot tell what she is fighting for, anymore, but he knows what he fears, that she will fight to keep him alive, that she has already said goodbye.

* * *

Haymitch is drunker than Katniss has seen him since the Quarter Quell card was read. She rubs her arm where the tube was removed, there is a small bruise which no doubt Cinna will be able to remove, and she closes her eyes for a moment until a wave of dizziness passes. She feels numb. Her mind will only travel so far, and her eyes blur as she tries to focus on the screen where Caesar Flickerman's entrance is trumpeted. He introduces the show, settles into a smooth white armchair and it is then that she sees the picture behind him, the tragic faces of the third Quarter Quell: the victors from District Twelve.

We are unforgiving.

Katniss watches as Caesar leans forward and grasps Peeta's hand in both of his. She thinks of a vice, holding something steady before it is split in two. She thinks: don't give them anything real, hold it tightly, fold it inside. She doesn't need to worry about Peeta; he is a consummate professional, even now. Still, she can barely watch as he begins to answer the host's questions. _She is resting, they want the wedding, a last moment of happiness before the games, _the lies fall from his tongue like kisses and the audience sighs and weeps. It is easy, manipulation is effortless, and Peeta is doing it for both of them.

When Katniss looks up Cinna is watching her.

She cannot hold his gaze and rises to leave.

"Don't go," Haymitch slurs, taking her arm, his clammy fingers closing around her elbow. "Have a drink."

"I don't want to drink with you."

"I hope it's just the medication talking, sweetheart, because you need to snap out of it."

Katniss shakes her arm loose from his grip.

"What is wrong with you?" Haymitch demands, catching hold of her wrist before she can turn away, his face close to hers so she can smell the alcohol seeping from the pores.

It is there, but she refuses to feel it, allow it to fall across her and pull her into the ground. On the screen the camera has closed in on Peeta's face but this time there are no tears. Haymitch is right, she is responsible, culpable if anything goes wrong, and her mother, Prim, Gale, everyone in this room, are relying on her. Then, why is it not enough? She needs Peeta. She needs him beside her now, to steady her before another nightmare takes hold. Instead, Cinna rises and takes her arm. She hears him tell her he'll help her to bed, and she moves like a sleep-walker with the stylist's arm around her shoulders, guiding her gently.

Cinna sits beside her on the bench at the end of the bed. The screen in the room has been set to a forest scene and it swims before Katniss' eyes. She can hardly take a breath.

"I made a choice and I was ready." The words tumble out.

"You knew Peeta would make the same choice."

"Yes," she replies.

"And, now?"

"I can't think straight." Katniss presses the heel of her hand to her forehead, and it is all dangerously close to the surface. "Whatever happens, I won't be able to protect everyone. I thought I could." Her chest tightens and she feels the sensation begin to proliferate, pulsing against her temples and blocking her throat. "What do I do?" she chokes out, grasping for his hand.

Cinna does not pretend to have the answer, but he holds her hand and when the tears don't come he helps her get ready for bed. She falls asleep before he leaves the room.

The nightmare begins immediately.

_Peeta is dead. He is covered in burns, and when she takes hold of his face some of his skin comes away on her fingers. Katniss screams and her knuckles strike the earth. She bends double over his body but he will not come back, there is no way to draw a breath from his lips. Consumed, she staggers to her feet and it feels like her body is splitting apart as she runs back the way she came. The little boy is curled in the fetal position a few metres from where she left him and when Katniss looks down she sees his hands are stained with berry juice._

_Nightlock._

_She calls his name and pulls him onto her lap, his lips and cheeks stained purple. _

_He has a name, but it's stolen as soon as it leaves her mouth._

_Don't leave me on my own._

_Don't leave me._

_Don't._

_Everything is lost._

_You cannot keep them all, there must be a sacrifice._

_She lies beside him and he is still warm, his hand in a fist at her chest, his head bent so her lips rest on his hair. He has such small hands and she thinks of them reaching up for her. It feels like dying. Then, he is gone and her arms are empty. She is in the arena and Peeta's hand is outstretched towards her, he touches her stomach and tells her to run._

_Run._


End file.
